


Modern Poetry

by curtaincall



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-05
Updated: 2014-02-05
Packaged: 2018-01-11 06:02:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1169556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curtaincall/pseuds/curtaincall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Annie and Abed take a poetry class together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Modern Poetry

**Author's Note:**

> "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is by T. S. Eliot. All the italicized passages are taken from the poem.

_Let us go then, you and I_

_When the evening is spread out against the sky_

_Like a patient etherized upon a table_

 

Annie had really wanted to take poetry, she’d said, and Abed had agreed to do it with her because he needed another class that semester anyway, and it didn’t conflict with anything, and lots of people used poetry as inspiration for films, so it wasn’t like it was completely irrelevant. The class was at seven p.m., in the fall semester, and as the days grew shorter their walk through the campus towards the English department grew darker, until at last it was lit by only the streetlamps that seemed always to be flickering, because everyone knew Greendale didn’t have the money even for new lightbulbs.

 

_Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets_

_The muttering retreats_

_Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels_

_And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells_

_Streets that follow like a tedious argument_

_Of insidious intent_

_To lead you to an overwhelming question_

_Oh, do not ask “What is it?”_

_Let us go and make our visit._

 

They would eat dinner before, always, in the about-to-close cafeteria. Abed had the same thing every time, always a chicken sandwich, always with pasta salad, even as winter grew closer and the food became less seasonable. Annie, he noticed, tended to vary her choices more, trying each of the options, occasionally not finishing her meal if she’d been too daring and the food was inedible. Abed treasured those nights, because those were the times that he gave her half his chicken sandwich, and because they’d already paid for their respective orders it was like he’d bought her meal. That seemed to be the thing that Cary Grant or Gregory Peck would do, and on those evenings with Annie he seemed to want to be one of those old-fashioned movie stars, debonair and assured, not the nervous little bundle that wondered, if I pay for her dinner, does that make it anything like a date? He paused, sometimes, and smiled, thinking about it, and Annie would prod him gently in the arm and ask if he was okay, and what was he thinking about. He always was, and he was never thinking about anything.

 

_In the room the women come and go_

_Talking of Michelangelo._

There was an art history class that met in the building with the cafeteria, that ended at six-thirty the same evenings they met for poetry. It was composed entirely of females, and each night they would flood into the hallway, buzzing about whatever they’d just learned. Once Annie waved at one of the girls, someone Troy had once pointed out as a former classmate from their high school. The girl didn’t wave back, and he watched Annie’s smile fade and thought about all the things he could have done or said to comfort her at that moment and realized they all sounded rather silly even in his head. So he sat there, helpless, and saw her bounce back from sadness all on her own.

 

_The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes_

_The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the windowpanes_

_Licked its tongue in the corners of the evening_

_Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains_

_Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys_

_Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap_

_And, seeing that it was a soft October night,_

_Curled once about the house, and fell asleep._

 

They left the cafeteria, each night, at exactly six-forty-two, because although it took Abed only seven minutes to walk to class, Annie’s legs were significantly shorter, and Abed slowed his down to match her pace, and then a bit more, so they went still more slowly, and they gained nearly two more minutes of time in the softly lit walkways together. Once, on a foggy night, Annie had bumped into one of the lampposts, not seeing it because the bulb was broken, and always after that, when it was hard to see, Abed would hold her hand because he had better night vision and could steer them around such hazards. He liked the foggy nights the best.

 

_And indeed there will be time_

_For the yellow smoke that slides along the street_

_Rubbing its back upon the windowpanes_

_There will be time, there will be time_

_To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;_

_There will be time to murder and create_

_And time for all the works and days of hands_

_That lift and drop a question on your plate_

_Time for you and time for me_

_And time yet for a hundred indecisions_

_And for a hundred visions and revisions_

_Before the taking of a toast and tea._

 

On the better-lit nights, when no guidance was needed to prevent injury, Abed would entertain Annie by doing impressions of her favorite movie stars. The first time she requested someone he’d never seen in anything, he stole all of her movies starring the actor in question and watched them on his computer in quick succession while she and Troy were grocery shopping. The next night he was able to pull it off, and seeing her grin happily when he did so was more than worth the nine hours of lame rom-coms. One night, he asked her if she wanted to see his take on Francis Martin.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Oh, he’s been in lots of movies. But fairly obscure ones. Indies mostly. Not your type of thing at all.”

“Well, give it a shot!”

Abed began to tell jokes, but the secret was, Francis Martin didn’t exist. He just wanted to see if Annie would laugh at him when he wasn’t playing a part, if he could get her eyes to light up as Abed Nadir. And she did laugh at “Francis Martin,” but he realized, too late, that he had no way of telling whether she was just faking it to be polite. And that he’d never had any way of knowing whether she actually thought his impressions were any good or if she was just humoring him. He stopped abruptly and told her he’d changed his mind.

After that, he stuck to real people, but somehow he couldn’t put the same amount of effort in, and it never went quite as well as it had before.

 

_And indeed there will be time_

_To wonder, “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”_

_Time to turn back and descend the stair_

_With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—_

_They will say, “How his hair is growing thin!”_

_My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin_

_My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—_

_They will say, “How his arms and legs are thin!”_

_Do I dare_

_Disturb the universe?_

_In a minute there is time_

_For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse._

 

He dressed differently, the days they had poetry class, and he wondered if she ever noticed. It came from an impulse that there was a divide in their costumes, that she was always sunny and casual, but well-put-together, and he looked, he knew, much younger than he actually was in his Internet T-shirts and sweatshirts and skinny jeans. So on the poetry nights, he went into the back of his closet and pulled out khaki pants and a sportcoat and tie and Oxford shirt and put them on, hoping that they now appeared to be operating in the same world, on the same level of dress, to anyone who might have happened to see them.

One night, though, he caught a glimpse of himself in the window of one of the buildings they were passing, and he almost didn’t recognize himself, and then he realized that this was because the clothes looked ridiculous on his thin frame, that they hung off him in the wrong places and made him seem like a preteen boy wearing his father’s work at tire for a school play.

After that, he switched back to his old clothes. Annie never mentioned it. He wondered if she’d even noticed.

 

_For I have known the days already, known them all_

_Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons_

_I have measured out my life with coffee spoons_

_I know the voices dying with a dying fall_

_Beneath the music from a farther room._

_So how should I presume?_

 

They had class in a room with the chairs around tables, rather than in rows. Abed and Annie sat next to each other, near the front, with the other students (there were maybe twenty-five people in the class, enough that Abed never had to talk but few enough that he didn’t feel overwhelmed, which was nice) grouped around the rest of the tables. The professor was a woman, maybe in her mid-fifties, and she stood at the board and drew circles around random words and read aloud from William Butler Yeats. Abed decided his favorite poet was T. S. Eliot, and was a bit disappointed when Annie picked Robert Frost instead. He started planning a film based around “The Waste Land,” where instead of different voices, all of the parts in the poem were played by a single actor, who would portray an actor playing all of the parts. He thought about doing it as the final project, but decided no, it was too layered for the class. Instead, he wrote an essay on “The Love Song of J. A lfred Prufrock,” and sat and read it over and over again while the class discussed William Blake’s inane rhymes. Annie insisted Blake was “adorable.” Abed resisted the temptation to point out that adorability didn’t necessarily make for great literature, because what did he know about great literature anyway.

 

_And I have known the eyes already, known them all_

_The eyes that fix you in a formulated gaze_

_And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin_

_When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall_

_Then how should I begin_

_To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?_

_And how should I presume?_

 

They had to memorize part of a poem and recite it before the class. Annie practiced for hours on “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and he nodded vigorously at her complaints when the day before she was scheduled to perform another student did the same poem. He helped her cram “Come In” the next night, and she recited it with vigor, and perfectly, of course (he wondered if she’d even needed his help). He learned “La Figlia Che Piange,” every word of it, but when he got up in front of the class on his assigned evening, he found himself unable to open his mouth, no matter how many people he tried to be. Eventually, the professor sighed and told him he could write it on the board instead to prove that he’d memorized it. He did, and mercifully was allowed to turn his back to the class while doing so.

 

_And I have known the arms already, known them all_

_Arms that are braceleted and white and bare_

_But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!_

_Is it perfume from a dress_

_That makes me so digress?_

_Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl_

_And how should I presume?_

_And how should I then begin?_

 

After class that day, Annie asked him to stay with her, in the classroom, after all the other students had left.

“What went wrong, Abed?” she asked, concerned. “Did you get nervous? You never get nervous.”

Abed couldn’t concentrate. All he could see was the skin of her arm where it was exposed below the elbow of her rolled-up cardigan sleeve, and the curve of her neck where a stray strand of straight brown hair had come loose from her headband, and all he could smell was something fruity and sweet that was maybe her breath and maybe her shampoo, and all he could feel was the one place beneath the table where their legs were touching, even through layers of her tights and his jeans, and all he could hear was her voice, not the words, just her voice, and all he could taste was the memory of her lips on his, and it tasted a little like bubblegum and a little like sweat and a little like orange paint, and although none of those things tasted good to him when alone, for some reason together they made him go soft somewhere inside.

He opened his mouth and then closed it again and then looked at hers, and wondered what would happen if he moved just a little closer. And in one second, his brain whirred and ran scenarios, trying to figure out how to do it, how to reach her.

 

_Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets_

_And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes_

_Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?_

_I should have been a pair of ragged claws_

_Scuttling across the floors of silent seas_.

 

Should he tilt his head left, or right, or not at all? Should his mouth be open or closed, should he say anything, should he ask if it was okay, should he blurt out all his thoughts in one glorious moment of utter un-self-consciousness? Should he whisper in her ear, should he aim for her shoulder instead, for her neck, her chest where it was exposed by the cut of her sweater, for the inside of her wrist, for the tips of her fingers? Should he…at all? Should he?

He was confused, so confused, and he tried again to be someone else but for some reason it wasn’t working, it was entirely not working, and he couldn’t pull on Han Solo or Don Draper or Bruce Wayne as a cover. They would have known what to do, and Abed somehow didn’t.

So he sat there, frozen, again, unable to move towards her, or away from her, unable to let the moment end or push it into the next one, entranced but unmoving.

 

_And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!_

_Smoothed by long fingers_

_Asleep…tired…or it malingers,_

_Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me._

_Should I, after tea and cakes and ices_

_Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?_

_But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed_

_Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter_

_I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter:_

_I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker_

_And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat, and snicker_

_And, in short, I was afraid._

 

At last, all of his agency returned, and the second he gained control of his body he used it to lever himself up, out of the chair, and then he was running, running out of the classroom and out of the building, through the sidewalks of Greendale and into the comfort of the car that Annie was going to drive him home in. He sat there, in the car, in the passenger seat, where he was accustomed to sit, and he threw his head in his hands and longed for the strength to cry.

Why couldn’t he move? Why couldn’t he do it? Why couldn’t he, for once, be the one to take control of the scenario? If he was the director, the one in charge of this whole story, why couldn’t he tell himself to reach out to her? Why did every muscle in his body revolt against the idea of consummating what it so desperately wanted?

He had thought that being aware gave him power, that it allowed him to observe his world and control it in a way that others couldn’t. But what had jus t happened had made it exquisitely clear that it also rendered him strangely powerless whenever he allowed his desires to overwhelm his more rational thoughts (though even his more rational thoughts had been heading in this direction lately), and right now he wished he could trade in any predictions he’d been able to make, any scenarios he’d ever been able to run, to be able to try to create that moment again, to change the outcome. But director-Abed couldn’t do that. Only real-Abed could, and real-Abed couldn’t rewind time.

 

_And would it have been worth it after all_

_After the cups, the marmalade, the tea_

_Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me_

_Would it have been worth while_

_To have bitten off the matter with a smile_

_To have squeezed the universe into a ball_

_To roll it towards some overwhelming question,_

_To say, “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,_

_Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all—”_

_If one, settling a pillow by her head, should say_

_“That is not what I meant at all._

_That is not it at all.”_

 

And real-Abed would never be able to do it anyway, because in this situation of all situations, there were so many variables, and so many things that could go wrong, and, most frightening of all, he had no idea how Annie would respond.

Because that moment hadn’t just been about him, and his desires, and fears, and impotencies. That moment had been about Annie, too, and Annie had made a choice, too, and she would have been thinking things and wondering things at that same time. And he cursed the fact that he had to live his life in the first person. Because what if she hadn’t been thinking about him at all? And how could he ever know if she had?

And that was the problem—that he would be forcing a situation where she had either to accept or reject him, and it was so much easier to let things go on as they were, rather than to try to do anything that might cause him to lose even these few possibly meaningless moments.

 

_And would it have been worth it, after all_

_After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets_

_After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor_

_And this, and so much more—_

_It is impossible to say just what I mean!_

_But as if a magic lantern lit the nerves like patterns on a screen_

_Would it have been worth while_

_If one, settling a pillow, or throwing off a shawl_

_And turning towards the window, should say_

_“That is not it at all._

_That is not what I meant, at all.”_

 

Though “easy” was so completely the wrong term to describe the poetry nights. They were pleasurable, in some ways the best parts of his week, but the pleasure was so delicate, so stressful. Not like his relationship with Troy: that was smooth and wholeheartedly enjoyable. His friendship with—crush on—love for—whatever it was, his feelings for Annie, they were hard on him, causing him to spend hours in the Dreamatorium wracking his brains over what each of her gestures meant. Because no matter how much he could predict about her mind, he could never quite figure out her heart.

And so to loop around to where he started, that evening, that had been what stopped him. He couldn’t control himself because he couldn’t control her, and that frightened him and saddened him and threw everything so far off script. He couldn’t tell whether or not the story had a happy ending.

 

_No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;_

_Am an attendant lord, one that will do_

_To swell a progress, start a scene or two_

_Advise the prince, no doubt, an easy tool,_

_Deferential, glad to be of use,_

_Politic, cautious, and meticulous,_

_Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse_

_At times, indeed, almost ridiculous._

_Almost, at times, the Fool._

 

And he’d known this from the beginning, but it had never been more clear than now: he was not the hero of his own story. That was Jeff. His arc was compelling: redemption, growth, learning to love. And he wasn’t even the villain, either—that was Pierce, sometimes, or Chang, sometimes, and once or twice someone else entirely. No, if life was a sitcom, he was a side character at best, a punchline delivery vehicle, a one-note gimmick. If he was lucky, someday he could reach Polonius’ status, in Hamlet, as the deliverer of one of literature’s most famous lines: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” But no one remembered that Polonius said that, or that it was uttered as a piece of clichéd advice rather than as an actual meaningful insight. And after all, Hamlet was the one who got “To be or not to be.”

No, he was just a supporting actor, a breakout character, maybe, but still the comic relief, never the heart of the story. And those charac ters—well, they never got to grow and change like protagonists did. They didn’t fall in love and struggle with their feelings and break their hearts, and if they did, it was played for laughs, or played out in the background of a scene, the C-story, maybe, of an episode. And so he could never break out of his rhythm, never mess with the formula enough to go for Annie, or indeed for anyone, because that would mean changing the focus of the series entirely, and that would never happen. His directorial instincts wouldn’t let it. Too dangerous.

 

_I grow old…I grow old…_

_I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled._

_Shall I part my hair behind?_

_Do I dare to eat a peach?_

_I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach._

_I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each._

_I do not think that they will sing to me._

 

So he would never be able to change, even though everyone around him did so. He’d grow older, but never age, because he was the constant, the unadaptable. Maybe it was inspiring or admirable or worthy in some way, that he was confident enough in himself not to need to change. And maybe it was tragic, because maybe he was just scared. But no one ever dug that deep with a side character, did they? No one cared.

Sometimes, he’d hoped that Annie had. He’d replayed that day in the Dreamatorium over and over again in his mind, wondering what had motivated her, why she’d decided to help him. She’d been so exasperated, so determined to teach him a lesson—was that all, was it just an impulse, or was there something more beneath it? Had she not kissed him when he was being Jeff because she truly didn’t love Jeff or because she couldn’t bear the thought of kissing Abed? (Clearly she hadn’t minded it when he was Han Solo, but in the Dreamatorium: well, ev erything was more fragile there, all her motions had hit closer to home.)

But no, no, these poetry evenings were proof positive of the fact that they were only good friends (and who even knew how much of that was in his head, as well…), and never could be more. That she saw him as a diversion, as a running gag, rather than as another person. And that thought might have been terribly unfair to her, but to him it was ringing incredibly true.

So he sat there in the car with the door closed and stared off into the distance, until the car lights faded because the doors had been shut for two full minutes, and it was the same as the lights fading down on the lonely man at the end of a movie.

 

_I have seen them riding seaward on the waves_

_Combing the white hair of the waves blown back_

_While the wind blows the water white and black._

_We have lingered in the chambers of the sea_

_By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown_

_Till human voices wake us, and we drown._

 

But then the lights flickered back on again, because Annie was there, and Annie had opened the car door, and she pushed her way in through the driver’s seat until she and he were close enough to touch, and she kissed him.

And with the tiny part of his brain that wasn’t focused on her mouth, Abed thought, maybe that ending back there was just a fake-out.

And then he thought, maybe this is how the movie ends.

 

 


End file.
